Title of Speech: AI and Recommender Systems for the Capital Markets

Qian Zhao is a manager in Bloomberg's AI Engineering group, which consists of 200+ researchers and engineers responsible for building financial solutions using technologies from Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Dialog Understanding, Graph Analytics, Time Series Analysis, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, Speech Recognition, Computer Vision, and Optimization. Some of the products the AI Group helps build include News, Research, Communications, and Finance. Bloomberg's AI Engineering group is an active contributor to the academic community; its researchers have published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in the last three years.

Before joining Bloomberg, Qian earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the GroupLens lab at the University of Minnesota, where he was advised by Professor Joe Konstan. Qian's research interests lie broadly at the intersection of machine learning and human-computer interaction (e.g., user-centered design and evaluation of online interactive recommender systems). Before that, he worked in industry in China for a few years, where he focused on large-scale data mining and machine learning systems for video recommendation and computational advertising products.

Qian has actively served the research community as the Proceedings Co-Chair of RecSys’22, a Senior Program Committee member of RecSys’21, the Associate Chair of CSCW’20, and as a Program Committee member for TheWebConf, SIGIR, WSDM, and other top academic conferences.

Title of Speech: AI and personalisation to bring a brighter future for all at Australia's largest bank

Luiz is a Data Scientist and Entrepreneur. He has more than 20 years experience working in the area of Artificial Intelligence. He has a PhD and a MSc in Computer Science both with focus on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. Luiz’s expertise also comprises the areas of Recommender System, Machine Learning and Data Mining.

Luiz is an academic at heart with a strong commercially-focused mind. His postdoctoral research work at the University of Sydney was directly applied at one of the largest online dating platforms in Australia. The principles were also responsible for the creation of Octosocial Labs which focused on friendship recommendations. Luiz was also the first member of the data science team at 1-Page Ltd (a San Francisco HR tech company) where he worked on employee recommendation and on a range of NLP problems helping some of the largest financial institutions in the world.

He is now the executive manager at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia leading the AI Labs. A team that focuses on improving the financial wellbeing of our clients and society while bringing innovations in AI/ML. Some of the work led by his team involved the detection of abuse using AI and the weather data model.